By Tshering Tashi
How many people get to attend their own funeral?
In 1981, deep in the remote eastern Himalayas of Bhutan, an English visitor stumbled upon a remarkable ceremony. A small monastery was hosting the funeral of a high incarnate lama, a revered spiritual master who had passed away 19 years earlier.
His body, carefully preserved in salt, had waited all that time for the assembly of ecclesiastical dignitaries from across the isolated kingdom.
Among the mourners, was a teenager observing the rites. This was no ordinary guest; he was the lama’s own reincarnation, present for the final farewell to his previous life.
This extraordinary scene was captured in the diary of the visitor, Roger Croston. His entry from Friday, 11 September 1981, offers a vivid, first-hand account:
“Stopped at Thunka (?) Monastery where 10 day ceremony for a famous Lama who had died 15 to 17 years ago. The body on a trestle covered in decorated cloth with a miter and money… Monks arriving outside with horses, some bows. A big fat lama doing the ceremonies with his grey hair tied into a tiny knot. As we left, the first bundle of sticks being brought for the cremation. The incarnate Lama came from Tibet with the title “Lord of the Skies” or thereabouts. Taken 17 years to get the big Lamas assembled…
Later we heard that the cremation had happened that day with the body being exposed, all shriveled up by now by the salt. His reincarnate is now 15 years old.”
Croston’s diary provides a compelling snapshot, but it also raises a question: Who was this revered lama, this “Lord of the Skies”?
According to one of Bhutan’s foremost historians, Lam Kesang, who was a young boy at the time, the high monk was almost certainly the sixth Namkhai Nyingpo Rinpoche. The historical timeline confirms his assessment.
The sixth Namkhai Nyingpo Rinpoche was a Tibetan master who escaped to Bhutan in 1959. He passed away in the Ura valley in 1962, but his body was preserved in salt, as was traditional for a figure of his spiritual stature. His reincarnation, the present and seventh Namkhai Nyingpo, was born in 1966.
The dates align perfectly. The funeral took place in 1981, precisely nineteen years after the lama’s passing. And in 1981, his young reincarnation would have been exactly fifteen years old just as the diary entry noted.
The 19-year wait for the funeral wasn’t just a logistical challenge; it was a testament to the lama’s immense importance.
The Namkhai Nyingpo Rinpoches are revered as spiritual royalty in Bhutan. The lineage traces back to the first Namkhai Nyingpo, one of the twenty-five primary disciples of Guru Rinpoche, the 8th-century master who introduced Buddhism to the kingdom. Because of this direct connection, they are considered by many to be almost second Buddhas.
The presence of a 15 year-old boy at the cremation of his own former body was therefore more than a historical curiosity. For the faithful, it was a profound affirmation of an unbroken sacred line—a living, breathing link between past, present, and future.